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In a recent piece published on the Huffington Post College Blog, librarians Jane Carlin (University of Puget Sound) and Barb Macke (University of Cincinnati), tackled one of the biggest questions facing the future of academic libraries: Do they need to keep collecting books?

Although these two librarians admit their bias (as most of us in the library world foster) toward the physicality of actual books, they examine the situations that are consistently facing academic libraries in the 21st Century. These center on the lack of usage for physical books by student patrons and the new demands for library spaces. They also focus on the “Three C’s” of academic library services as dictated by student visitors.

These include Collaboration (creating collaborative spaces in academic libraries for students and faculty), Creation (making the academic library the center of knowledge creation on campus), and Contemplation (creating that “awe” moment in reading rooms or library facilities that enriches academic programs). In addition to these three criteria, the authors encourage academic libraries to look to the future of academic models, shifting from collection-based experiences to engagement-based experiences with an emphasis on advanced technology, special collections and flexible environments.

This engagement-based path of academic libraries, in lieu of massive print collections, has also been under scrutiny due to unclear, and often unfair, copyright laws that govern the ways in which academic libraries can share and utilize subscriptions to ebooks. A recent effort led by library directors from 66 small academic libraries, known as the “Oberlin Group,” has attempted to fight back against publisher restrictions on sharing ebooks between institutions. The ability to utilize inter-library loan allows smaller academic libraries to build competitive collections without spending the same amounts of money as large research universities.

So what does this mean for DRS? As students and academic libraries begin to shift away from collection-based attraction, online environments become much more important. If the interactions that students and faculty are having with resources are increasingly online, then it is up to people like us to make sure that finding and using resources online is just as intuitive as taking something off of a shelf. It is important for everyone involved in academic libraries to understand the foundational changes that are going on in our industry. Here at IU, these changes are becoming more apparent with the creation of the Scholars’ Commons, which is currently undergoing construction.

Pete Coco’s recent post on the ACRLog discusses the ups and downs of discovery projects like EBSCO Discovery Service, a tool recently implemented at the IU Libraries as OneSearch@IU. Coco writes that these tools may look like Google, with their sleek white single search bars and straightforward interfaces. They may even act a little like Google, crawling through thousands upon thousands of resources to bring you only the most relevant, most perfect source you could possibly imagine. Right? Well, not quite. According to Coco, who is a humanities liaison and library instructor at Wheaton College, although his students are usually able to find something using these discovery tools, they are not always able to find the thing. One reason for that could, of course, be unreasonable student expectations. Students often suppose that their sources must iterate their perspective verbatim, or cover the exact parameters of their research question. Of course they’re not going to find a source comparing the ironic symbolism in Franz Kafka’s Before the Law with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Some things just don’t exist. That said, student misconceptions about scholarship might not be the only issue at play. While discovery services, acting as a sort of hybrid between Google and academic databases, are good for getting students into the research pool, often it leaves them in the shallow end. Once students understand the scope of what’s available, more specialized databases might be just the ticket to finding the thing and giving students that tough-love push into the deep end of scholarship.

That is precisely why quality information literacy instruction is still a necessity in academic libraries – to help students find their scholarly legs in a strange new land of information. In order to achieve that end most effectively, perhaps we should be emphasizing the differences between popular and scholarly modes of information gathering, rather than the similarities. Despite OneSearch@IU’s outward resemblance to Google, the fact is that it is not Google, and we are not doing students any favors by marketing it as such. Coco writes:

To find the scholarly articles that will meet the paper requirement, the student will need navigate a host of alien concepts, vocabularies and controversies that will, at least at first, drive his experience with peer-reviewed scholarship. And while some degree of anxiety is probably useful to his learning experience, there can be little doubt that the process would be easier and of more lasting value to the student who has support—human support—as he goes through it.

Advances in technology require more, not less, pedagogical attention to ensure that students comprehend the underlying structures of scholarly communication. We often expect this generation of tech-savvy undergraduates to see a blank search bar and know what to do with it. But the reality is, not all search bars are equal. Effective library instruction serves to illuminate the unique function of academic databases and discovery services as compared to popular search engines. After all, if what you want is Google, you can always go to Google.

For a graduate assistant in DUX, I’m actually a bit of a luddite when it comes to new technology. My phone is not smart, my computer remains firmly planted on a desk, and my books are the kind that won’t crash when you spill coffee on them (a necessity, given my reading habits). That said, when I read about Apple’s new iBooks Author software, I drooled a little bit. iBooks Author works in conjunction with the iBooks 2 app, released by Apple in mid-January, to allow Joe Nobody to publish his very own digital book. It’s clearly geared toward the educational community with an emphasis on textbook publishing, but ostensibly you can publish any kind of book your heart desires (yes, even that sci-fi novel you wrote when you were 16. HarperCollins doesn’t know what it was missing).

No, I don’t harbor a secret desire to publish a textbook (or Zombie Vampires from Mars, even though it would have been an instant classic), but I do harbor a not-so-secret desire to see educational materials become more accessible. Apple has teamed up with several prominent publishers to deliver textbooks that normally cost somewhere in the triple digits at much lower (dare I say reasonable?) prices. Digital distribution makes good sense in the textbook market, where new editions come out every few years. Who wants to drop another $200 because the editors added a new chapter and updated citations? No one! Just consider how much coffee $200 could buy. iBooks Author further increases accessibility by enabling instructors to publish their own materials digitally. I could see this technology easily taking the place of traditional course packs, which are expensive for the university to print, expensive for students to buy, and wasteful of natural resources (yay trees!). All this with the fun of mixed media (embedded YouTube videos in my textbook? Yes, please!) makes me think that edu-apps like iBooks and iBooks Author are indicative of the future of educational materials.

Caveat 1: As it stands, iBooks textbooks are only viewable on Apple mobile devices. There seems to be some way to convert these files to PDFs so they can be viewed on other devices, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details and Apple’s documentation certainly isn’t helping me out on this front. In the name of educational democracy, a work-around for students without iPads would need to be in place before the iBooks app is fully implemented in the classroom.

As a future librarian, my question is this: How can libraries get it in on the edu-app fun? Here in DUX, we’re working daily to make our available resources more mobile-friendly. What else can libraries do to reach students who increasingly learn digitally? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Earlier this month PIL released their findings from a short-term technology study they completed during the spring of 2011. For the study they interviewed 560 undergraduate students at 11 different libraries on 10 different campuses during “crunch time” to determine how students use technology during stressful times of the year. “Crunch time” is defined as the two weeks preceding final exams. For the interviews, they asked students what tasks they had been engaged in during the last hour and what devices, resources, and library services they had used to help them complete those tasks. The purpose was to discover how students managed technology and how they defined their “individualized information space,” the array of applications and programs students had open on their devices that aided them in task-completion.

The researchers found that students largely engaged in a kind of restrained multi-tasking. They would switch tasks frequently, but would have only a few devices or applications running simultaneously. 85% of students interviewed were classified by the researchers as “light” technology users. In other words, they were using two or fewer devices and engaged in two or fewer primary activities. The students seemed to take a very focused approach to technology, conscientiously winnowing down the devices they used to match their information needs.

Only a small percentage of the students interviewed were using the library for its scholarly resources – such as print or e-books, online databases, or reference services. Many students indicated that, more than anything, it was the communal scholarly atmosphere that drew them to the library during the final weeks of the semester. The library offered these students a unique environment in which they could escape into their work, while still sharing in the collective experience of the finals crunch.

This study provides some surprising insights into how these digital natives manage technology during times of stress. Rather than hopping distractedly from device to device, or website to website, they purposefully limited their technology use to support their current task. Even though a large majority of students had “time-wasting” sites like Facebook or gossip sites up on their devices, they often used these to incentivize learning. These sites provided a way for students to hit the mental refresh button. They would use the “Facebook break” as a way of rewarding themselves for a job well done or refocusing their attention on studying. Although the most common task students were engaged in was communication (via email, texting, Facebook, etc.), these students were not engaged only in communication. It was seamlessly interspersed with their other activities. They often used social networking sites or other means of communication as part of their coursework to schedule meetings or discuss issues with their instructors and peers.

In this study, students managed their learning spaces, both physical and digital, in a very similar manner. They allowed themselves a taste of the outside world, while choosing technologies and spaces that would ultimately focus their attention back on scholarly pursuits. This is something that resource and website developers ought to be mindful of when designing materials for college students. They do not want to be inundated with information (at least not during times of high stress). Rather, they want focused materials that have a clear connection to the task at hand. On the other hand, the results of the PIL study also indicate that students want their resources to be integrated. The students interviewed had little issue using the same technology for personal communication one moment and research the next. Although it is best to use this kind of integration with caution (i.e. ask yourself if it appropriate for your resource to be linked to Facebook), the multi-purposing of technologies is clearly something that current college undergraduates are comfortable with.

The Pearson Foundation recently came out with a report that highlights the changing landscape of tablet usage among students, in both high school and college settings. The study was done to “gauge college students’ and college-bound high school seniors’ opinions about digital device ownership and purchase intent; perceptions towards tablets; tablet usage and features of interest; and preferences between digital or print formats when reading, studying and doing other school-related activities.” The outcomes are particularly interesting for a number of reasons-while ownership of devices is still low (only 7% of the almost 1100 college students and 4% of the 200 high school students surveyed owned tablet devices), the interest in tablets is booming. Nine out of ten of those who own tablets said the device helped them study more effectively and efficiently, and three quarters of those surveyed said they thought tablets helped students perform better in class. One of the biggest shifts, researchers note, is the way that this interest in and acceptance of mobile technology affects the use of digital textbooks. Check out the entire report!

DUX recently completed a needs assessment as part of our mobile web site redesign project. We surveyed 52 students at several IUB Libraries and asked them to comment on how they use the IU libraries, how they conduct research, and which mobile devices and applications they use. Participants also provided feedback on the current IU Libraries Mobile Site. A summary of our findings is listed below.

Key Findings

60% of respondents own a smartphone.

Undergraduate students appear more likely than Graduate students to own a smartphone.

Smartphone operating system usage is divided: 57% use Apple iOS, 37% use Android, and 6% use Blackberry OS.

96% of respondents do not own a tablet computer, 76% have no intention of purchasing one, and those that will purchase will do so at least 6 months in the future.

The problem, simply stated: For early adult users in particular, lots of things to search, too many results, how to choose rightly?!

There is a long, distinguished list of brighter minds than mine who have addressed this problem. Nevertheless, here are some of my thoughts on how to make progress:

Information literacy (or fluency, if you prefer). As an academic library, does not nearly everything we do begin and end with teaching? It’s so easy to agree with Nielsen about teaching the people to fish: we know that so many of them are figuratively standing in the middle of the creek making a grab, and they’re getting hungry. Thank you, and keep fighting the good fight, instruction librarians everywhere. [Here’s a special shout out to the good folks of our Teaching & Learning department.]

Specifically, it’s a high priority for DUX to enhance our current class pages so that they better meet the needs of our teaching librarians and our teaching faculty as they work together to support and facilitate student learning at all levels. For other ideas related to this, see point three below.

Better discovery. First, if we want civilians to use library search interfaces – voluntarily and joyfully, anyway – they need to be much, much more like Google or Amazon. Rest assured, I too have a deep and abiding love for the power of peer review, scholarly content, controlled vocabularies, indexing, and their noble brethren. (Please don’t run me out of town on a rail!) But, really – who wouldn’t prefer a friendlier, more responsive IUCAT, for example? In a world where quality content and fantastic interfaces co-exist happily, even experts will love being able to do what they need to do more efficiently and more easily. There’s a lot of power in leveraging our end-users’ existing mental models, particularly as a starting point for novices. Once we hook that unsophisticated user with some positive experiences, she’ll be more ready for us when we roll out the specialized resources and advanced functionality that information professionals know and love.

Second, if as Nielsen said, people are treating search engines like ‘answer engines,’ then we are uniquely positioned in our ability to load our discovery resources with good answers … in a ‘chocolate is good for you’ way, not in a ‘here’s a bran muffin for Halloween because it’s healthy, nevermind that kid over there with the king size candy bar’ way. Up to now, I’m guessing the complex trajectory from identified information need (AKA assignment?) to PDF-in-hand feels more like the latter than the former.

Bringing this back to IUB: EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) is one obvious way to reach the “early adult” population Project Information Literacy talks about, and we at DUX have been working towards implementing this resource, checking and double-checking how catalog records display in the interface, which features to enable and which to switch off, and thinking a lot about how best to integrate its results into the Resource Gateway. Look for big action on this front very soon – like, this summer.

EDS isn’t the only thing, though – the integration of a discovery layer as the public interface for IUCAT is going to be a huge step forward in this area, and a system-wide task force is working away to evaluate the two candidate applications, VuFind (example: Mirlyn [Michigan]) and Blacklight (example: Searchworks [Stanford]). If all goes to plan, we should all be basking in a new OPAC as soon as next June.

Contextualizing information. The world isn’t simple. Neither are library websites – and across our profession, we are engaging with the hard work of eliminating unnecessary institutional complication from the inherent complexity of scholarly information and the research process.

Let’s frame the user’s experience in a way that helps them process what they see … and let’s do it invisibly and automagically, whenever possible. In some cases this is going to mean beginning by presenting fewer choices, and trusting our users to dig deeper to more comprehensive listings when they are ready. This idea can be hard for us to accept – but careful curation is everything. Imagine a huge empty wall in a museum: first, fill it with paintings; then, picture it with only three. What does this say about focus of attention?

In other cases, it’s going to mean finding ways to dynamically deliver relevant help – a project near and dear to my heart, and one that has a high profile on the DUX radar, is the development of a system that will allow us to do just this across our website and within IUCAT, too. We do a good job of embedding mechanisms for feedback (IM, email) and we can continue to seek opportunities to expand as vendors enable this functionality within their interfaces, and as we update and redesign our mobile presence.

Rendering the intricacies of our many-faceted collections, services and resources into something that’s simple enough for a novice, but powerful enough for an expert, might be the one of the very hardest – and most worthwhile— things we could ever do. Now, I’m going to wrap up this post so I can flee the building before everyone reads what I said about Google …

I only wish that the results he reports seemed less obvious, but it felt distressingly familiar – the topic of a thousand conference presentations, committee agendas, casual conversations with colleagues, and internal dialogues across libraryland.

Some highlights, or low points, depending on how you want to look it:

By and large, people aren’t very good at searching, and they don’t course-correct well;

They will type into any box they can find;

A lot of the stuff that’s out there to be found is junk;

While technology is making this a little better, none of this is improving fast enough.

So what do we do about it? Nielsen suggests “more education” and better interfaces, and who am I to disagree with that! (Although the fact that he doesn’t once mention the existence of an entire profession of trained searchers and information specialists in reference to the dilemma he presents is slightly deflating. I see yet another call for more and better library PR.)

Of course there’s other, more library-focused research. If you haven’t been reading the very interesting reports published by the Project Information Literacy researchers: yes, they are long, but yes, they are worth it. To quickly sum up: Project Information Literacy, based out of the University of Washington’s iSchool, has been studying how students (early adults, so primarily undergraduates) do research, using a variety of methodologies at a wide array of institutions nationwide. While their results show that students do turn first to course readings for assignment-based research, they have done some work on how students look for non-academic information that echoes Nielsen’s findings: when left to themselves, students aren’t sure how to process what they find.

In the interests of being a bit more specific about actions we might take, I’ll share some ideas of mine … next week! Same bat time, same bat channel: see you there!

We certainly enjoyed the recent webinar series on Google Analytics, Library Analytics: Inspiring Positive Action through Web User Data (an ALA TechSource webinar/workshop), and we hope that you did too. If you missed the sessions the first time around, we do have access to the archives, so give us a yell if you’d like to see them.

We also wanted to collect some information here, for easy access. Enjoy!

As an undergraduate and, more recently, a graduate student, I have noticed many students no longer want to go to the library to conduct research. In fact, many times when students go to the library, they are going to meet with a study group or rehearse a presentation because of the availability of study rooms. Many resources are in digital format and only require a computer with an internet connection for access. This means that more and more students are using the library”s website to find information and conduct their own research.

One of my main projects as a graduate assistant for the Digital User Experience has been working with Google Analytics to understand what information it can provide to increase usability and accessibility of Indiana University-Bloomington’s library website. The first few months were spent mining data and exploring the wide range of information that Analytics can provide.

What I have been doing on a monthly basis is mining four separate statistics about page usage. These are the number of visits a page receives, the average time spent on a page, the number of visitors who exit from that page (exit %), and the number of visitors who enter and exit on a certain page (bounce rate). They are presented in charts that can be graphed by month, week, or day. This is incredibly useful for noticing trends in a page’s usage and can provide great information about the page. For example, a page may see little use but have several days where usage spikes. This could mean that the page is being taught in a seminar, which would account for many people using it on the same day.

The statistics of these pages can provide great feedback on the usage of the page. A page full of information should have a higher “average time on page” statistic than other pages. If it is low, then there may be a problem with how the information is displayed; is it too difficult to read, is it in a logical order, etc. By knowing the date the page was last modified, one could see on the graph if those modifications have had an impact on its use (whether it be more visits or people spending more time on the page).

Another tool that I’ve found useful is In-Page Analytics. This allows you to view any of your tracked pages with an overlay of information about visits, average time, etc. Through this the user can see which links are used the most (ranked by percentage of total page clicks and with the number of clicks) and be provided with a more visual idea of the navigational flow of the site. The page can be browsed using the same view as the visitor, but also contain information on how the user passes through the site. If an information page has a low “average time on page” statistics, you could view that page and, with the overlay, see what links people are clicking to leave the page. Maybe they don’t readily see the information they are seeking and think another page may be of more use?

Google Analytics is also great for providing information about the demographics of the site’s visitors. It allows you to see where your users are from, right down to the number of users per town or city. It can provide information on how people are viewing the site based upon operating system, browser, screen resolution, screen colors, and what version of java or flash they have. This can help page design be optimized for the specifications of the viewers.

Mining the data is fairly easy; the difficulty is what questions to ask of the data and what it can answer. Analytics provides a huge array of information, but is useless if there isn’t a way to interpret the data. We have been in the process of looking more closely at the data for subsets of the library (services and departments) and other libraries. With these groups we have been asking cursory questions such as what trends are occurring, is this page still needed, who uses these pages, are people delving deep into the site’s hierarchy or only looking at top-level information, and is this page being properly utilized? This has helped to understand how to use the data, but I think there is still so much more to be gained from the information Google Analytics can provide.